Barely a month ago, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City triumphantly used billionaire Ken Griffin’s $238 million apartment as a prop in a social media video hailing a state plan to tax multimillion-dollar second homes.
But on Monday, as Mamdani met with two captains of finance, he seemed eager to project a more business-friendly demeanor.
Mamdani met first with Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who had in a recent letter to shareholders warned that New York’s tax policies risked driving business out of New York City.
“No city — or company or country — has a divine right to success,” Dimon wrote in April.
Afterward, Mamdani met with David M. Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence.
Joe Evangelisti, a spokesperson for JPMorgan Chase, said that Dimon and the mayor “had a constructive conversation around the importance of government and business working well together to help New Yorkers and to keep the city competitive.” A spokesperson for Goldman Sachs had no comment.
In a statement, the mayor’s press secretary, Joe Calvello, described the meeting with Dimon at the company’s new Park Avenue headquarters as “genial.”
It was unclear how long either meeting had been in the works.
Mamdani is New York City’s first mayor to be wholly associated with democratic socialism, and his tax-the-rich campaign platform has long annoyed many in the business community.
Relations between the mayor and big business grew particularly heated on Tax Day, when Mamdani stood outside Griffin’s lavish midtown Manhattan home and portrayed it as Exhibit A in his case for taxing pricey second homes. The video has since been viewed more than 52 million times on social platform X.
Griffin responded with a publicity tour of his own, describing the mayor’s video as “creepy and weird,” and suggesting that it had put his life in danger.
The mayor “seems to have forgotten that the CEO of another American company was assassinated just blocks from where I live in New York,” he said, referring to the 2024 murder of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO.
Then Vornado Realty Trust CEO Steven Roth, Griffin’s partner in the development of a new tower on Park Avenue, joined the fray, comparing Mamdani’s tax-the-rich rhetoric to hate speech.
Since then, Mamdani has been making the rounds on what appears very much like a big business reconciliation tour.
Last week, Mamdani met with the Blackstone president, Jonathan Gray, a meeting that the mayor set up after the Griffin outcry, a person familiar with the matter said. The mayor also met with Brian Moynihan, the Bank of America CEO, at the end of last month.
“The mayor has had a number of productive meetings with business leaders over the past few months, and he looks forward to continuing to engage with the business community because he recognizes the critical role that the business leaders play in our economy and in our city,” a spokesperson for Mamdani, Dora Pekec, said.
In the meeting between the mayor and Dimon, Calvello said the two men talked about “the importance of rooting out waste in government, cutting red tape” through land-use reform “and how the public and private sectors can collaborate to deliver both excellent public goods and a thriving city where all New Yorkers can succeed.”
Mamdani, he added, “also expressed appreciation for JPMorgan Chase’s long-standing presence in the city.”
For his part, Dimon gave the mayor a copy of “Our Towns,” a 2018 book by James and Deborah Fallows, in which the authors explore the United States by propeller plane, spending time “chatting up the economic development czars” in various localities and emphasizing the importance of public-private partnerships, according to a book review in The New York Times.
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
By Dana Rubinstein and Lauren Hirsch
c. 2026 The New York Times Company
